ENBIS was founded in 2000 to advance and facilitate the development and application of statistical methods to the benefit of European business and industry. It has been successful in promoting good practice in statistics, bridging the gap between methodology and application and fostering networking between practising statisticians in academic and commercial settings. This special issue contains 15 papers, which further demonstrate and illustrate these aims and activities.The special issue starts with three papers on design of experiments. Godolphin discusses the important issue of missing data and design breakdown and develops conditions for connectivity and robustness of incomplete block designs. 1 On a related theme, Alrweili et al propose a minimax loss response surface design which is robust to observation loss when compared to similar designs in the literature. 2 Han develops an optimal design for accelerated life testing of manufactured products. Various optimality criteria for the design are considered, and the existence of the optimal designs is investigated for exponential lifetimes with a single stress variable. 3 The next group of papers makes contributions to control charts in statistical process control (SPC). Abbas et al investigate dispersion control charts under median rank sampling schemes aimed at improving the design. The proposed charts are evaluated in terms of relative efficiency and power for normal and non-normal processes. 4 Perdikis and Psarakis contribute a survey paper on multivariate adaptive control charts. 5 The paper provides an extensive discussion of recent advances in a rapidly growing area of SPC. Wilson et al propose a method for monitoring changes in dynamic networks described by a degree corrected stochastic block model. 6 Their approach involves first estimating the model parameters and then monitoring the estimates using SPC techniques. The surveillance strategy is applied to a dynamic US Senate co-voting network. Dobi and Zempleni develop a monitoring procedure, based on Markov chains, to target healthcare data. 7 The proposed method is capable of monitoring shifts in the mean patient health indicator, as well as allowing for treatment effects and time between patient visits. The procedure also takes into account protocol costs, which can be a critical factor in adoption of a monitoring scheme.We then present three application-based papers within the remit of data science. Smith et al discuss issues in the provision of data analytic services through examples in the automotive aftermarket sector. 8 The data analysis is followed by a discussion of the implications for analyst and client and provides useful insight into the practicalities of working in this emerging field. An important subject within data science is semi-supervised learning and this is the topic of the next paper. Frumosu and Kulahci develop an outlier detection procedure for unlabelled data using scarce labelled data. 9 The proposed methodology uses a combination of Hotelling's T-square and Q statistics and...